


You miss too much these days if you stop and think

by xzombiexkittenx



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcoholism runs in the Winchester family, Demon Dean Winchester, M/M, Sam 'Boy King of Hell' Winchester, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-11-26
Updated: 2008-11-26
Packaged: 2017-11-04 10:42:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/392963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xzombiexkittenx/pseuds/xzombiexkittenx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten months the meatsuit they’ve uncovered has been rotting in the ground </p>
<p>Like season four, but without the heavenly host</p>
            </blockquote>





	You miss too much these days if you stop and think

**Author's Note:**

  * For [twasadark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/twasadark/gifts).



> [Podfic by on_varra can be found here](http://www.audiofic.jinjurly.com/you-miss-too-much-these-days-if-you-stop-and-think)

Sam sits nursing his bottle of Jim Beam and watches Ruby paw through his supplies. He’s drunk as hell already. Drunk as hell.

He laughs, and it scrapes up his insides and comes out ragged and ugly.

Ruby scowls at the bottle, pushing aside the guns so she can find some thing or other. The guns are the only thing still working right, oiled up and checked and rechecked. Sam still hunts when he remembers to crawl out of the bottle for five minutes. So he keeps the guns loaded with salt and silver and iron and tries to pretend that every single one of them isn’t a suicide waiting to happen.

Ruby goes back to setting up a clumsy circle of candles and herbs. “Sam,” she says, on hands and knees in chalk outlines. “ _Sam_ please. Something important is happening. The demons are on the move…Sam please.” Her hair spills dark over the pale of her skin and she’s got that slight lisp that Sam would find more attractive if she wasn’t Ruby and he wasn’t so goddamn tired. It’s funny, Sam’s always liked blondes better. Brunettes are more Dean’s thing. Were Dean’s thing. 

The sun comes in through the blinds, bars of light caging her, putting her eyes in light, shadow, light, shadow as she moves, slants across Sam’s left leg, across the hand holding the bottle, winking off the glass. It was a nice day when Sam stumbled to the store on the corner to buy himself another week’s supply of liquor.

“I can’t,” he says. “We tried, and I can’t.” The whiskey doesn’t even burn any more.

*~*~*

The demon leans against a tree and watches one of her cohorts, Alastair, toss another shovelful of dirt onto the growing mound. She remembers doing her share of digging in her mortal days, night after night spent in graveyards, the scrape of the shovel, the strain on human arms and a human back. The hands of this borrowed body are soft and nicely manicured and she’s got four inch heels on. She tosses her long blonde hair out of her eyes and huffs impatiently.

“Takes you less than a minute to flay all the skin off someone, but you can’t dig up a fucking body,” she says. “It’s kind of pathetic.”

Alastair looks up, irritated, and stabs the shovel into the dirt. “You could help,” he says. 

She smiles at him, bats her eyelashes at him. “Who says I want it anyway?”

“You should be down on your knees, grateful for this gift.”

“I’d ruin my pantyhose,” she says and doesn’t mention that she doesn’t kneel for him, not any more.

They have to lift dirt out with the corpse so it doesn’t fall apart, slow and careful because the joints are eaten through and the flesh clings loosely to the bone. She takes her heels off to do it, the soles of her bare feet black with freshly turned earth. Ten months the meatsuit they’ve uncovered has been rotting in the ground, torn up so the worms can get right to the guts without even having to try. Eyes, and ears, and mouth, and nose maggoty and eaten through. It’s a fucking mess, is what it is.

It’s a shame, that body was real pretty.

She wrinkles her nose and stays back so she doesn’t get fluids on her skirt. She wants to take the body she’s in out to a bar, see if she can’t make some deals, maybe get laid and she can’t do that with putrefied corpse on her.

She can see skull, wet flaps of skin peeling away. The body should be in the last stages of decomposition by now, little more than a skeleton. Hell can only do so much, can only hold back so much of God’s work, and even the larvae in the body are God’s creatures doing His will.

“I’m going into town,” she says, “call me when you need me.”

Alastair protests, but he doesn’t need her for this part, the set-up for the ritual, and the rotten meatsuit is making her borrowed stomach turn over. It’s the smell, she tells herself. Just the smell. She finds the nearest bar, sweet-talks three idiots into selling their souls, fucks one of them, lets him bruise up this body, lets him ride her too rough. 

The body she’s riding belongs to one Amy Jennings. Amy is still alive. She’s been out of it for most of the time, but every once in a while she’ll come to, sobbing and disbelieving that the nightmare is still going on for her. It’ll be over soon enough. Four days forgotten, body sore and in an unfamiliar town in a different state. She’ll call home to her mom who will drive out and pick her up. She’ll talk to a doctor and a shrink, and in the end she’ll just try to forget about it. She’ll be forgiven. There’s probably a special place in heaven for those who’ve been ridden by demons.

Alastair calls and the demon goes back to the grave and tries to pretend she’s not impressed by the ritual. Flesh become whole, body knit back together. Fallen angel shit, not low-level demons like her. She does kneel now, soles of her feet, and knees and palms stained.

The angel, great dark wings stretched out behind it, battle-scarred and beautiful, puts a hand on her head and she presses her face down so it too is smudged. The angel pulls her up, wipes the dirt from her forehead and presses a kiss there. Then it puts its hands on the corpse, wraps long fingers around the rot of its biceps and does what only angels can do. It doesn’t talk to her, which is good, she doesn’t think this body could stand it. She knows Alastair’s couldn’t, but he’s a punk-ass little bitch and even though he’s been a demon for far longer than she has, even though he made her what she is, she already outranks him in everything but title and that will change soon. He’s still kneeling. She likes that, likes this shifting in her favour.

The angel leaves and the air smells like ozone and three in the morning.

“Get on with it,” Alastair says, brushing himself off and she blows him a kiss before she leaves Amy Jennings crumpled in the dirt. 

The demon hovers in the air, incorporeal, over the corpse. It’s not impressed by what the angel did, it’s fucking terrified. It understands its place, it understands how important this is and what it needs to do but this mission it’s been sent on has the potential of going royally pear-shaped real fucking fast. Self-doubt isn’t really one of a demon’s finer traits, but isn’t questioning what got them into this mess in the first place? It questions its place and if it will be wanted.

It goes into the corpse anyway, because this comes from the top and who the fuck is it to argue with angels, when they almost never get involved? It finally got permission to crawl out topside, practically got pulled out by one of the Fallen.

The only soul in this sack of man is the demon’s, it’s strange, he’s never ridden a soulless body before. He sits up, feeling the body respond, feeling the whole thing start working again, heart-pumping, stomach complaining that the body is hungry and thirsty. The body takes a moment to respond but then he’s getting to his feet, brushing the dirt off his shirt and jeans. Wasn’t even buried in a goddamn suit. Unmarked grave in the middle of fucking nowhere. Nice.

He didn’t want this body back. 

That’s not how things are supposed to work. You die, you go to Hell, you turn into a demon, circle of life, your body becomes the grass sort of shit. You don’t get your old body back.

The demon knows this skin too well. It cradles the black of his soul and he sinks down into it, stretches out and it feels like home.

Alastair smirks at him. “The late, great Dean Winchester,” he says.

He’s used the names of the bodies he’s stolen, to keep off Lilith’s radar, to keep anyone from looking too closely into the alliances of this new demon fresh from the Pit. He’s been Amy, Virginia (Ginny), Chris, James, Eddie, Maria, and so on and so forth, for two months now, he’s been topside. But they found his old meatsuit, and told him about the Plan, and so here he is. Dean Winchester again.

“In the flesh,” Dean says and starts the long walk back to the piece of shit car Alastair drives.

*~*~*

This was not what Ruby was expecting.

Sam stands at the very edge of the devil’s trap, arms folded. His body is strong; the lines on the walls and floor and ceiling are stronger. She thinks they are anyway. She doesn’t know this demon, doesn’t know if he can crack the walls and crack the trap and crack their bones. The demon walked right in, right into the trap, and sat down. He was waiting there when Sam woke up from an alcohol induced nap, was still sitting there, when Ruby arrived. Let Sam Christo him, let them splash him with holy water.

“What’s your name?” Sam says.

“Dean Winchester,” says the demon, black eyes wide.

Sam doesn’t move. “Your name,” he says. His face is set but she can feel the tremble in his muscles, his need to reach out to the thing wearing his brother’s body, to put his hands on it

The demon rolls up the sleeves of his t-shirt and there are two handprints burned onto his skin. “An angel did it,” the demon says and blinks back to green; under Ruby’s hand against his back, Sam’s breathing hitches. “That’s how I got out, that’s how I got my body.”

Ruby curls her other hand around the swell of Sam’s bicep, tugging slightly. “I think it’s him,” she says. The demon looks at her and she tightens her grip on Sam. She reaches out with her mind and finds him waiting. He is stronger than he looks and that can’t be right, he shouldn’t be like this after so little time. “It’s him.”

The demon, Dean, comes right up to the edge of the trap, toe to toe with Sam and looks up at him. “C’mon, Sammy,” he says. “You’ve already got one demon on your side, what’s one more?”

Ruby tries to warn Sam that this isn’t his brother any more, that demons don’t care about family or their human lives. That no way an angel pulled a demon out of the Pit. She tries to tell him what they must have done to him and how that must have broken him but Sam scuffs out an inch of the trap and she doesn’t stay to watch the reunion. If there’s one thing Ruby has learned it’s that demons are territorial, cliquey creatures, made up of factions and favourites and right now she is not welcome here. She won’t fight Dean over this. He’s never been the more reasonable of the Winchester boys anyway.

They’re still standing there, staring at each other when she closes the door behind her, the last of the light limning them in red-gold.

*~*~*

The body is freshly showered and re-dressed in some of Sam’s clothing so Dean shuffles barefoot in too-big jeans and has to roll up the sleeves of the button down. This is as good a place as any to stay for now, it’s been well warded, and Sam seems fairly entrenched.

“I guess you missed me, huh?” Dean says, picking up another empty beer bottle and dropping it into a hefty bag. The takeaway cartons are already out which is helping the smell of the room, but there’s a fucking liquor store emptied out and scattered around.

Sam sits down on the edge of the bed he’s stripped and remade, and puts his head in his hands. “Jesus Christ, Dean,” he says and he sounds like he’s about five years old. 

“I’ve been out for two months,” Dean says putting down the trash bag, and Sam looks up again. “Not in this body, I’ve ridden others. I didn’t kill any of my hosts. I still think Ruby is a useless bitch, but I still want to kill Lilith.” He goes to his knees in front of Sam, puts one hand on Sam’s forearm. “I’m not the same. But you’re still everything to me, I’d still die for you, and I still love you.”

It’s easier to say things like that now that he’s screamed and sobbed and begged for the pain to stop. He’s seen the ugliest parts of his own psyche, and the brightest. Thirty years of torture puts the important things into sharp focus. Dean’s never seen so clearly.

“Demons lie,” Sam says in a small, miserable voice. He’s brushed his teeth, but Dean can still smell the lingering odor of whiskey on his breath.

Dean reaches up and draws Sam down to him. They kneel on the floor and Dean takes his brother in his arms and hugs him until Sam hugs back. “Not to you,” Dean mutters against the hang-over hot skin of Sam’s neck. “I won’t lie to you, Sammy.”

They tortured him for thirty years and when he climbed down off the rack, they took a soldier and made him a general. 

Because every king needs a general.

*~*~*

Sam stands in the field, sun-dry grass under his feet and the smell of the highway behind him. There are twelve beer cans lined up on a rotten fence. Dean leans against the Impala, legs crossed at the ankles and raises an eyebrow.

“Those ain’t coming down on their own,” Dean says.

Sam remembers long summers spent with his brother, just like this. Running drills, learning to fight, shooting cans off fences. This time his hands are empty, and they’re both older, Dean’s eyes are 8-ball black but he’s looking at Sam with that same expression. The one that says, “I know you can do it, so stop dicking around.” Even when Sam couldn’t, even when Sam thought he’d never get anything right, or good enough for his father, Dean’s unwavering faith in his gawky little brother, his utter devotion, it made Sam better.

“I’ve tried this with Ruby,” Sam complains.

Dean makes an uh-huh sound that says everything he needs to about his opinions on Ruby. “You’re thinking too hard,” he says. “It’s not about pushing and pulling, it’s about what you want. Imagine the world the way you want it. Like, there are cans on the fence that you don’t want there. You want them to blow up, or fall down, or whatever. This isn’t telekinesis.”

“Be the change you want to see in the world?” Sam says and Dean laughs, corners of his eyes crinkling up.

“Yeah,” he says. “Exactly. Now use your Jedi mind tricks on those cans so we can go and…” Dean stops and scratches at the back of his neck awkwardly. “I was gonna say go kill some beers the traditional way but maybe you should dry out a bit.”

Sam’s heart lurches painfully in his chest. Because this is temptation, right here squinting into the sun telling him he’s not trying, and he drinks too much, and he’s got shitty emo taste in music. Temptation isn’t fame and money and power and women and the world at his feet. It’s his older brother watching his back and he wants it so bad he’s actually listening. Because it walks and talks just like Dean, and Ruby says it’s him and Sam can’t spot the difference. And it hasn’t asked for anything in return. He. Dean. Hasn’t asked for a damn thing in return.

“You gonna stare at me or do this thing?”

Sam looks at the cans perched on the fence and wishes they were on the ground, wants them on the ground. They glint dully in the light, lined up as Dean set them. Dean pushes off from the Impala and stands next to Sam. “Use the force, Luke,” he says and puts a hand on Sam’s back, above the scar he sold his soul for. He touches Sam a lot more than he used to. “It’s not like what Ava said,” Dean says. “You already know how to do this, you’re just looking at it the wrong way.”

Sam looks at Dean again, at the slight smile on his face, and the freckles across his nose, and the now-green of his eyes. Dean puts his other hand on the back of Sam’s neck and kisses him. He pulls away before Sam can do more than be surprised, but he doesn’t let go.

“Just like that,” Dean says. “You just have to want it.”

*~*~*

Ruby sits across from Sam and Dean and watches Sam spin forks without touching them. He makes the headlights of cars turn on and off in the dark of the parking lot where the neon sign advertizing the diner gutters and hisses.

“That’s a nice party trick,” she says. Dean’s been teaching his brother things all their lives; she shouldn’t feel annoyed that he succeeded where she failed. Three tables over a small child squalls unhappily, loudly. He stops when a bright blue balloon appears above his head, string in his fist.

“Yeah,” Dean says, around a mouthful of pulled pork. She bets they peeled the skin off him and stuffed it down his throat. Looks like he learned to like the taste.

She saw a balloon shop four stores over, closing down sign in the window, paint peeling off the door. Sam’s not materializing things out of thin air, he’s just moving things around. Small things. But he’s still doing it. She didn’t even try to teach him this. Sam’s beaming stupidly at the way the kid is jerking on the string to make the balloon bob in the air and Dean’s got his brother’s number all right, their legs pressed together under the table, shoulders bumping in the narrow of the booth.

Ruby reaches for some of Sam’s onion rings, trying not to look as unhappy as she feels. Dean stabs his fork through her hand. The tines scrape quietly across the linoleum. “Don’t,” he says and his eyes are black.

She doesn’t know what faction of Hell got their hooks into Dean, what power restored his body, what side he’s on. He says Sam’s side, like her, but she wants to stop the world from ending and Dean’s got the handprints of angels on him and a plan to make Sam bend the world as it pleases him. They’ll talk, eventually, her and Dean. Somewhere out on the asphalt, while Sam sleeps, they’ll come together in the skins they wear to please Sam and she thinks he’ll leave this girl’s body by the side of the road with her own knife stuck between her ribs.

Dean looks at her, mean and dangerous in the twist of his mouth, calm and considering in the smooth skin of his forehead and eyes. He knows how many bones are in the human body, how many pints of blood, how many teeth and inches of skin and miles of muscle. He knows how to break a soul and how to twist one. She did too, once, but she ran from it. 

“Dean!” Sam says, aghast and Dean pulls the fork back out. The holes will heal, so long as Ruby is in this body, and it’s not fatal, but she doesn’t think Sam is going to be too mad about it since Dean’s eyes are green again and he’s licking sauce off his teeth and frowning at Sam like Sam’s the one being unreasonable.

“You gotta set some rules,” Dean says. “She walks all over you.” He mutters something that sounds like, “fucking disrespectful.”

“You can’t _do_ stuff like that!” Sam says. “How about ‘no assaulting people with cutlery’ for a rule?”

Dean cocks his head to one side. “She’s not people,” he says.

“Shut up,” Sam says, shoulders coming up.

Ruby doesn’t expect Dean to twist in his seat so he’s facing Sam, kicking her accidentally in the process, and she doesn’t expect him to touch his fingertips to Sam’s arm, light, like he expects to be pushed away. “Hey,” Dean says and Sam looks at him from under his bangs. They’re too big for the space, too much power, demon blood and demon, brothers and everything else, spilling out onto the dirty green tiles of the floor, making the locals look at them out of the corners of their eyes. “I’m sorry, dude.”

“You’re still people,” Sam says fiercely, but he’s talking to Dean, not to Ruby. “You’re still my brother.”

Sam doesn’t tell Dean to apologize to her. It all seems forgotten when Sam uses his powers to get them pie and Dean uses his to steal crusting from Sam’s piece. Ruby wonders if the faction of Hell that went to so much trouble with Dean has any idea what they’ve done. Maybe they don’t want to break the sixty-six seals and bring about Armageddon, but they want something and think they can use these two to get it.

Angels are walking the Earth and Ruby’s heard rumors of a girl who can hear them talking, of eyes burned out of heads, of a rising power, bright as the Morningstar with the free will of a human and the gifts of demons. 

“I’m sorry,” she says to Dean, when Sam’s using the restroom. “I should have asked him.”

Dean nods at her, a little suspicious, but pleased. “You’re forgiven,” he says and she leaves while he’s still in a good mood with her.

*~*~*

The sheets are a thin, worn, blue-grey, pulled out of place, twisted and sweat-soaked. The pillows are flat and smell like cigarette smoke, one of them jammed up between one of Dean’s elbows and the headboard. He’s down on one elbow, the other hand pressed flat against the cheap veneer of the headboard, face down, on his knees.

“You can’t hurt me,” he says, voice breaking on a moan. “Sammy.”

Sam mouths wet and slow up his spine, two fingers pushed up into Dean. “Whatever I want,” Sam says, “that’s what you said.”

Time moves differently in Hell. Time moves differently on this motel bed, too. Dean’s been ready since he sucked Sam hard, let Sam fuck his throat, let Sam spread him out on the bed and lick him open, push his fingers in slow and slick. He’s sweating, the muscles in his arms shaking. He’s been in this body too long, he’s getting used to it again. Sam bites gently at one shoulder and crooks his fingers, rubbing until Dean’s stomach is wet with pre-come and he’s told Sam to just get on with it, begged Sam to just fuck him already, told him how good it would be, how good he could make it. 

“You can’t hurt me,” he says again.

Sam works a third finger into Dean, and Sam’s got long, thick fingers, but it’s a smooth push, lube messy between Dean’s legs. “Don’t be such a stereotype, Dean,” Sam says, voice rough, halfway to being something like what Andy could do, he does it now without thinking sometimes. “Don’t you lie to me.”

He fucks Dean slow but hard. And Dean makes soft punched sounds, spreads his legs wider and braces himself. The headboard knocks chunks of wall plaster onto the carpet, until Dean can’t keep his eyes green and he comes, panting Sam’s name, until Sam’s muscles ache and his hands feel sore from holding on to Dean so tightly.

They lie in the sweat-soaked, come-sticky sheets, Dean’s arm under Sam’s head, one of Sam’s hands high on Dean’s thigh. The fan creaks feebly overhead, lightbulbs rattling in their fixtures, the soft sounds of a dying moth battering at the inside.

“All hail the boy king,” Dean says, breathless.

End.


End file.
